Catherine Ireton – Museum of Classical Archaeology
Catherine Ireton is a singer-songwriter and theatre maker. She creates performances pieces in which music is a central part, exploring the smallness of things and celebrating the ordinary. Performing mostly in intimate and unusual spaces, she creates music and theatre that has a direct and immediate connection with the space and the audience.
Catherine trained in theatre at University College Cork. She has worked with theatre companies in Ireland, Scotland and England including Grid Iron, Root Experience and Farnham Maltings. Alongside her theatre work she is an established vocalist and a songwriter, working with international artists Belle and Sebastian, God Help the Girl, Go Away Birds and elephant. Catherine is produced by Farnham Maltings.
Georgie Grace – Whipple Museum of the History of Science
Georgie Grace works with video, text, and installation. Her practice examines modes and limits of immersion and perception via the distinction between still and moving image. Existing somewhere in between these categories or sometimes in neither one, her videos become a framework for thinking about the structuring of information and experience, visual sensation and interference, the idea of the event, and the action of editing.
Helen Arney – The Fitzwilliam Museum
Comedian Helen Arney has performed her science-tinged comedy songs everywhere, from under a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Oxford to CERN in Geneva, via the Hammersmith Apollo and BBC Radio 4.
Helen also makes up one third of science comedy phenomenon Festival of the Spoken Nerd, and has filled several notebooks with rhymes for Uranus – none of which are printable here.
John Hinton – Cambridge University Botanic Garden
John Hinton is a theatre practitioner who explores various aspects of science in much of his work. His self-penned solo musical comedy about Charles Darwin (see www.originofspecies.info) has been touring the world to sell-out crowds and five-star reviews for the past three years, and recently earned him nominations for Best Performer and Best Production at Adelaide Fringe Festival. His follow-up, a musical comedy called Albert Einstein: Relativitively Speaking, was peer reviewed by a panel of physics professors at Sussex University and has drawn rave reviews in the UK and Australia. He is currently directing a show for Teater EnKor in Gothenburg about the origins and proliferation of language, which opens in late September, and is also working on a show about philosophy for children for Tangram Theatre in London.
Aside from acting, directing and playwriting, John runs workshops in performance skills with all ages (including science-related workshops teaching physics through juggling and particle physics through drama games), and is also singer-songwriter with intergalactic pop group Spalien Acecraft.
Katy Schutte – Museum of Zoology
Katy is an improviser and theatre maker. She has been a director and performer with improv company the Maydays for 10 years and regularly plays in Katy and Rach, At Home with Katy and Tony and Project Two. She has also worked with Fluxx, Music Box and Baby Wants Candy. Katy trained at the Second City and iO bootcamps in Chicago, as well as with teachers from the Annoyance, UCB and more.
Katy co-created and directed The Watery Journey of Nereus Pike with Fringe First winner Laura Mugridge. She also made two interactive audio shows with Tony Harris for The Campsite at the Ipswich Pulse Festival and the Natural History Museum. Katy recently wrote and performed her first solo show I Have an Idea for a Film at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe along with her fan tribute musical ‘Who Ya Gonna Call?’ which received rave reviews and left standing room only. She also created and directed improv show Oh Boy! The Quantum Leap Show for the Maydays.
This year, Katy also performed in site-specific immersive theatre show The Butcher of Baker Street for Forked Path as part of Theatre Delicatessen’s Spaced 2014 and launched Geekeasy – a comedy show for nerds – with Project Two.
Laura Mugridge – Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Laura Mugridge is a theatre maker, comedian and writer. After working on the stand up circuit for several years, her first theatre solo theatre piece ‘Running on Air’ won a Scotsman Fringe First Award in Edinburgh 2010. This show was performed to five people at once in her 1978 VW campervan, Joni. Her next show ‘The Watery Journey of Nereus Pike’ is the story of an old man floating to the bottom of the sea, where he becomes myth and magic. She is also currently touring with a show for families ‘Tony and Mike,’ a piece that she co-created with theatre maker Tom Frankland. Laura’s work has an emphasis upon audience participation and playfulness. She is interested in tiny details and how they connect us all. As well as this piece for The Campsite, she is currently working on a new piece about birth and midwifery, inspired by the homebirth she had in 2012. She is also writing her first book.
Lily Johnson – Kettle’s Yard
Lily Johnson’s work is about certain things leaking through. She draws on her background in sculpture to develop performances using costumes and objects, often as a response to a specific, idiosyncratic site.
Worked out in relation to audience, architecture and situation, the performances often involve a costumed figure hiding, moving slowly, not speaking, inhabiting the space.
Lily is a 2014/15 Artsadmin Bursary artist. She graduated from the Sculpture and Environmental Art department at the Glasgow School of Art, lives and works in London, and has shown live works at The Departure Foundation, the ICA, Floating Island, the Tin Tabernacle, the Royal College of Art, The Showroom and Brass.
Rachel Mars – The Polar Museum
Rachel is a performance maker and writer, borrowing from theatre, live art and comedy. She makes things about coping, about the idiosyncratic constructs that surround social interactions, about cultural habits and inheritance. Sometimes that’s been through a straight performance (‘The Way You Tell Them’, a show about the uses and abuses of comedy ), or through a pop-up choir singing found and collected texts (‘Sing It! Spirit of Envy!), mashing together Margaret Thatcher’s top ten speeches with chronologically matched pop hits (Mars.tarrab’s ‘The Lady’s Not For Walking Like An Egyptian’) by arming small children with hammers, playing them Motorhead and inviting them to smash up her dad’s terrible pottery work (Home Live Art – Where The WIld Bits Are). Her work has been at venues around the UK including the South Bank Centre and Barbican and at festivals including Spill, WOW, Norfolk and Norwich, in NY and Melbourne. She is also a contributor for BBC Radio 2 and 4.
www.rachelmars.org
Tom Adams – Museum of Zoology
Tom Adams is a Performer and Composer who trained at Circomedia, Bristol under Bim Mason. He has worked with, among others, Miracle Theatre, Metro Boulot Dodo, Bicycle Ballet, Company FZ, Laura Mugridge and Red Herring Productions and composed music for theatre shows including ‘Tony and Mike’ by Tom Frankland and Laura Mugridge, ‘I Have An Idea For A Film’ by Katy Schutte and ‘The Watery Journey of Nereus Pike’ by Laura Mugridge.
He will be touring his part music gig, part theatre, part love letter solo show ‘Still Score’ this Autumn to venues across the country. He is also currently learning how to Street Dance for his new show ‘Howl at the Moon’ which he will make in 2015.
Flora Marston and Grace Gibson (Two Front Teeth) – Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences
Two Front Teeth is the ongoing conversation between Grace Gibson and Flora Marston. Based in London, they make nosy theatre that focuses on the moments you don’t always give a second glance; discovering the similarities in differences and contrasts that are closer than you think.
We don’t copy and paste theatre: our devised work is highly reliant on the space that we find ourselves in, and invites and encourages curiosity from our audiences.